Papers by Nicola Bernardini
Written for the meeting to celebrate John Pierce´s 80th birthday, Northwestern University, Evanston, Il. 15-16th November, 1990
Considering the pace at which technology evolves, 35 years is no small amount of time. 35 years i... more Considering the pace at which technology evolves, 35 years is no small amount of time. 35 years is the age of Computer Music, if Max Mathews’s early experiments in the IBM window in central Manhattan constitute the starting point for all that has come since.
During these 35 years, we have dreamt plenty of different dreams. We have, over and over again, done and re-done always the same job, a little better each time: get sound out of digital machines. By "we" I mean all the musicians, scientists, composers, technicians, hardware specialists, music analysts, in brief, everyone involved in threading music to computers.
In the beginning, this thread was really thin: only some truly stubborn scientist or some insane composer with a strong faith would travel hundreds of miles to and fro with a tape full of output samples produced in some university to have it played to the only available tube digital to analog converter somewhere in the East Coast.
Today, the thread has become a glamourous avenue full of advertisements, marvelous shops, a few dark alleys and some tramps sleeping here and there. Nowadays, the music market hardly considers traditional instruments, scores, music paper, etc.: the real money-makers are small, self-demo-ing digital gizmos with millions of preset sounds, huge hard disks, accelerator cards (for the bolder ones), the ever-growing class of MIDI tools of some sort and the like.
That is certainly enough to bore me out of my own metaphors. At any rate, the question "Do we have what we were looking for?" is still a hard one to answer.
international computer music conference, 1995
International Computer Music Conference, 1995
International Computer Music Conference, 1989
This paper documents and summarizes the (still ongoing) work concerning the digital recovery of t... more This paper documents and summarizes the (still ongoing) work concerning the digital recovery of the collection of composer Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988). This recovery has a number of peculiarities which are mostly related to conditions in which the tapes were recorded originally and to the functions these recordings covered in Scelsi's compositional work. The specific archival process and model used are then described and future work is outlined at the end.
Computer Music is over fifty years old and a meditation over the relationship between music and t... more Computer Music is over fifty years old and a meditation over the relationship between music and technology is useful, possibly extending it to the social and cultural context in which this discipline was born. The planetary political system where computer music was born was characterized by a strong antagonism between two ideological blocks in which culture had a tremendous impact in western countries to demonstrate the advantages and the richness of democratic, progressive and innovative societies. The end of this antagonism has generated a steep decrease of interest in cultural investments by the owestern countries, and computer music has evolved in the present sound and music computing: a much wider interdisciplinary field which encompasses many areas where the combination of sound, music and information technologies still produces brilliant results. This paper will also develop some of the current issues at stake in the sound and music computing area:1) the rise of the commercia...
Sonic Interaction Design (SID) is an emerging field that is positioned at the intersection of aud... more Sonic Interaction Design (SID) is an emerging field that is positioned at the intersection of auditory display, ubiquitous computing, interaction design, and interactive arts. SID can be used to describe practice and inquiry into any of various roles that sound may play in the interaction loop between users and artifacts, services, or environments, in applications that range from the critical functionality of an alarm, to the artistic significance of a musical creation. This field is devoted to the privileged role the auditory channel can assume in exploiting the convergence of computing, communication, and interactive technologies. An overemphasis on visual displays has constrained the development of interactive systems that are capable of making more appropriate use of the auditory modality. Today the ubiquity of computing and communication resources allows us to think about sounds in a proactive way. This workshop puts a spotlight on such issues in the context of the emerging domain of SID.
A (partial) taxonomy of software applications devoted to sounds is presented. For each category o... more A (partial) taxonomy of software applications devoted to sounds is presented. For each category of software applications, an abstract model is proposed and actual implementations are evaluated with respect to this model.
In the first edition of the DAFx Conferences an extensive tutorial on professional and research s... more In the first edition of the DAFx Conferences an extensive tutorial on professional and research software devoted to sound and music making was presented. The present paper attempts a revision of the concepts expressed in that tutorial, focusing particularly to the aspects related to research and innovation fostered by a strong paradigm shift that has happened in the mean time: that of Free Software development. Of course, this paradigm shift has also had its difficulties and harsh spots, requiring many extra efforts in order to overcome them. This paper will try to describe these as well as to outline the current state-of-the-art in the field. 1.
Real-time/performed electroacoustic music is currently facing a serious sustainability problem. A... more Real-time/performed electroacoustic music is currently facing a serious sustainability problem. Although historically its production is very recent, several technological revolutions have gone by in the meantime. Most of these works can hardly be performed because the technology involved has gone lost since the first realization, and no long-standing notational precaution was ever taken. This paper (first published in 2005 and translated in Italian for the first time) presents some typical case studies and introduces some techniques that might lead to a partial — when not completely adequate — solution to the sustainability problem.
Although the use of the phase-vocoder is not a very recent technique in musical applications and ... more Although the use of the phase-vocoder is not a very recent technique in musical applications and an extensive literature exists on the subject (cf.[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] ), hardly any fairly complete reference implementation can be found (cf. for example[9] pp.256-258, where the resynthesis part is performed through an oscillator bank instead of an iFFT). This paper describes in depth an implementation of a phasevocoder which was entirely coded in MATLABTM to be added to the COST-G6—DAfx web site as the reference source code implementation of all phase-vocoder based effects. The code is licensed in the terms of the General Public License (GPL) used in open-source projects and can thus be picked up from the COSTG6—DAfx web site and re-used for further research and development.
Journal of New Music Research, 2002
... 1996). “Sintesi del movimento e dello spazio nella musica elettroacustica” in La Terra Fertil... more ... 1996). “Sintesi del movimento e dello spazio nella musica elettroacustica” in La Terra Fertile. Atti del Convegno 1996, De Amicis, Maria Cristina and Prignano, Ignazio eds., 27–31, L'Aquila. [14.] Vercoe, Barry (1986). CSOUND ...
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Papers by Nicola Bernardini
During these 35 years, we have dreamt plenty of different dreams. We have, over and over again, done and re-done always the same job, a little better each time: get sound out of digital machines. By "we" I mean all the musicians, scientists, composers, technicians, hardware specialists, music analysts, in brief, everyone involved in threading music to computers.
In the beginning, this thread was really thin: only some truly stubborn scientist or some insane composer with a strong faith would travel hundreds of miles to and fro with a tape full of output samples produced in some university to have it played to the only available tube digital to analog converter somewhere in the East Coast.
Today, the thread has become a glamourous avenue full of advertisements, marvelous shops, a few dark alleys and some tramps sleeping here and there. Nowadays, the music market hardly considers traditional instruments, scores, music paper, etc.: the real money-makers are small, self-demo-ing digital gizmos with millions of preset sounds, huge hard disks, accelerator cards (for the bolder ones), the ever-growing class of MIDI tools of some sort and the like.
That is certainly enough to bore me out of my own metaphors. At any rate, the question "Do we have what we were looking for?" is still a hard one to answer.
During these 35 years, we have dreamt plenty of different dreams. We have, over and over again, done and re-done always the same job, a little better each time: get sound out of digital machines. By "we" I mean all the musicians, scientists, composers, technicians, hardware specialists, music analysts, in brief, everyone involved in threading music to computers.
In the beginning, this thread was really thin: only some truly stubborn scientist or some insane composer with a strong faith would travel hundreds of miles to and fro with a tape full of output samples produced in some university to have it played to the only available tube digital to analog converter somewhere in the East Coast.
Today, the thread has become a glamourous avenue full of advertisements, marvelous shops, a few dark alleys and some tramps sleeping here and there. Nowadays, the music market hardly considers traditional instruments, scores, music paper, etc.: the real money-makers are small, self-demo-ing digital gizmos with millions of preset sounds, huge hard disks, accelerator cards (for the bolder ones), the ever-growing class of MIDI tools of some sort and the like.
That is certainly enough to bore me out of my own metaphors. At any rate, the question "Do we have what we were looking for?" is still a hard one to answer.